In my last post I complained that Nate Silver is obscuring the real state of the race by adding artificial uncertainty to his model, and adding artificial uncertainty to the media horserace by refusing to debunk conservative claims of "dem oversampling". We can call Nate Silver's forecasting Market Probability, since it is apparently shaped by market forces. It is not the same as True Probability.
Some have accused me of tinfoil hattery.
But I'm not alone.
Jonathan Chait says:
Who’s winning the presidential race? There’s an odd disconnect between the polls and the body language of the candidates. John Harris and Alexander Burns report from Tampa, “Republicans believe Obama’s governing defects should make a GOP victory virtually inevitable, but Romney’s political defects make it only a long-shot possibility.” Likewise, Mark Halperin, after extensive discussion with Obama’s campaign team, remains convinced that the campaign is not bluffing about its belief that it remains ahead in the race and unlikely to lose barring an unforeseen external event.
Why is Team Obama so confident? What do they know that Joe Public doesn't?
I know the answer.
This election isnt really about the economy-- its about demographics.
And like Nate Silver once said (before he was co-opted by the NYT)....
Demographics is destiny.
Ron Brownstein gets it.
Michael Medved got it two years ago.
The percentage of white people in the electorate is shrinking.
And only white people are voting for Romney.
Chait again:
The best explanation I can muster is that the polls are assuming a much different, and more GOP-friendly, electorate than either party. ABC’s poll assumes that 78 percent of registered voters are white. That is … a whole lot of white people. The white share of the electorate has been dropping steadily for more than twenty years — from 87 percent in 1992 to 83 percent in 1996 to 81 percent in 2000, 77 percent in 2004, and 74 percent four years ago. Ron Brownstein’s recent reporting suggests that both campaigns expect an electorate that’s about 74 percent white. The same problem seems to appear in numerous other polls. Many of them don’t release their racial breakdowns, but those that do seem to imply electorates far whiter than the campaigns are banking on. As pollster Mark Blumenthal has exhaustively shown, Gallup has systematically underweighted the number of minorities in its polls, due to technical issues related to the difficulty of finding and weighting poll respondents.
You see....the disconnect between Obamas confidence and the polling...is cell phone demographics.
Most national polls are robopolls. Much cheaper.
But cell phones don't answer robots. Landlines answer robots.
Who has landlines? White male property owners and old people. Two demos that vote republican.
31.6 % of American households are cell only. 47% of americans have smartphones.
And cell-onlies and smartphone users go Obama by 20 points.
So Obama has every reason to be confident.
He's
winning.